The Wind has Shifted to a Northwesterly Direction

What then is very, very important?  What concerns are so important that we must go out and address them with energy and stamina? What roles do faith and belief play?

Wearing his fedora, a man pauses at the edge of a small stand of thin trees in that special time between day and night.  Autumn, if it has not fallen, will surrender to the siege soon. Winter will prevail.  The sky is a dark white, maybe light grey, but it is snow laden and threatening to let loose soon.  Presently the ground in the woods will also be white. Dingy paths of mulch clear now will be covered up by new clean sparkling snow.  The earth’s warmth will keep the sidewalk where he stands silent and still clear for a time, but only for a time. For the man in the hat this moment in the trees exists before a “snow event.” In his heart and in his mind, he knows the dark time of the year is almost here.

Clad in his long leather coat the man found himself stopping to gaze into small wood.  Over the warmer months it has been his shortcut on the walk to work.  Light falls through a green canopy on summer mornings and the route is soul refreshing. The man’s dark eyes survey the small empty wood he has been journeying through over these past five months.  Forty years he thinks to himself forty years and this wood is not really much different that when I first came by this way. No tree had seemed to be more than a few feet taller.  No tree seemed more than a maybe an inch thicker.  He was 90 pounds heavier, six inches wider and everything about him had changed since that first trek through this trees.  The world, he thought to himself, has turned upside down.

Standing at the start of the thin woods snowflakes were beginning to occasionally fall and find their way to ground, a warning not to delay perhaps.  This space, this place was very much the same as when he first passed this way.  How much longer until these trees are fully mature he thought silently.  How much longer until I am mature he then mused.  His slight smile hid a good natured inner guffaw at that question. The joke gone his face lost some color and his smile sagged.  The idea that raced to the front of his consciousness was how much longer until my country matures?

Light was now fleeing this end of day.  With the hints of snow threatening, the air was cold enough that he could not linger long here.  Were these clouds not so dense, the sun would have been fading and falling away behind his back.  One foot moved forward, for he knew he would have to push on toward his appointment with dinner at home. 

100 years ago, had he been standing here without a tent pitched already or a cabin in his sightline he would have been in trouble. Precious life might well had been in jeopardy if he lacked flint and a knife.  Tonight, he was simply going to take a short cut on the walk home.  Standing on that path amongst those trees now forty years his acquaintance he knew and he believed that after his meal there was work to be done.  There were concerns of daily life and of the greater good that could not be neglected, not now.